Nate Parent of Best Worst Trivia hosting at Ri Ra in Portland. Photo by Conall McGinley

Nate Parent of Westbrook barely even went to trivia nights when he first saw an ad to host them for $50 a gig. But he has always been a confident public speaker and discovered he was a natural. He and Ben Taylor were hosting for a national company when they started writing their own questions. They launched Best Worst Trivia out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the business now hosts trivia nights at a dozen locations in Greater Portland. To see a full schedule of bars and restaurants where you can find Best Worst Trivia, visit their Facebook page or to see all the trivia nights happening in the area, go to pressherald.com/guides.

Parent, 48, answered five questions – but none so tricky as to stump him. This interview has been edited for length.

You said your business exploded out of the pandemic. Why do you think people were more enthusiastic about attending trivia nights?

Everyone spent more or less two years cooped up. One, the bars and restaurants wanted us because it helped people and gave people a reason to come out. But I think people had been missing the sense of community over that time and getting to go out. We’re team-based trivia, you know; almost all our bars are up to six players per team. You can’t use phone at our trivia. We’ll DQ you. You can play, but we won’t let you win. So you’re going to spend two hours actually sitting there, talking face to face with your friends, family and coworkers. I think that’s one of the things people really like. You actually have some real face time with people while you’re playing trivia.

What are some of the skills needed to be a good host?

I’ve done public speaking my whole life, so it’s just natural for me, and that’s definitely one of the big skills to be the host, to have a good speaking voice, to get the timing down. And we really encourage all of our hosts, and they do this, to get to know your players. Make it like a little community that every week gets together, and get to know them by name. You become friends with a lot of them.

There are six of us at Best Worst Trivia. The other five are all great at trivia. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not good at trivia. I’m good at writing the questions. I just don’t have the memory. I can’t recall the stuff as well. Just a few weeks ago, I went and played at a horror movie trivia night, and I won playing alone against all the other teams. It’s a niche topic, I know.

OK, so tell me what would be your personal best, niche category? 

I always joke that, if I took input and I just wrote everything, all we’d have would be wrestling, horror and comic books. Those would be the three topics if I was the only one that had any say, and it would get pretty boring for everyone pretty quickly.

So how do you develop the questions?

Our strongest gimmick we have is every night at least one team picks a topic for next week. We let our teams pick. One, because it helps people come back. But, two, that way we get suggestions that I’d never think to write a trivia round about, but obviously someone wanted to hear about it. So we find that helps keep it fresh all the time, because on any given night, at least half of our six rounds are suggested by teams.

We’ll get serious ones. I had to do one last week for “American foreign interventions that went south.” And last night, I had one about hats. Just hats. Obviously, a lot of pop culture stuff. Harry Potter is always super popular, the Marvel stuff. For some reason, “Friends.” I just got a request, and I’ve got to write about “Friends” for next week. “Friends” will never die.

You look into the topic, especially if it’s one you don’t know well. You do a little bit of research. What I usually do first is I’ll just pick the 10 things I want to ask about that topic, and usually that’s a list of more or less what my 10 answers are going to be, then it’s trying to come up with more questions. The challenge is always trying to gauge how difficult you’ve made the round because sometimes I’ve written rounds that I thought I made way easy, and it killed all the teams. They did terribly. And vice versa. I think, that’s a pretty tough round, and everyone aces it. It’s not usually like that, but that’s probably the biggest challenge.

What are your tips for being successful as a trivia team?

A widely varied team, generationally, really helps. If you’re going to have a team that has a few people in their 20s, and you got some people in their 40s. We always do a music round, and our music rounds will cover music from the 1970s all the way through modern songs. So if you’ve got people of a wide variety of ages, that tends to help.

I always found elementary school teachers are great trivia players because they have to know a lot of different stuff. And the other one I’ve found, bartenders. Bartenders are great at trivia.